Duolingo refuses to hire employees in favor of AI — details

Duolingo will abandon contractors and rely on AI. The popular language app developer is switching to the AI-first model and plans to gradually reduce the amount of work currently performed by external contractors.

The Verge writes about it.

Duolingo plans to replace humans with AI

In an internal letter to employees posted on LinkedIn, Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said that from now on, the company will gradually stop involving contractors in tasks that can be handled by AI. The transition to the AI-first approach, according to the CEO, will require rethinking many workflows: small adjustments to human needs will no longer work, so some systems will have to be created from scratch.

Von Ahn emphasized that the new strategy is not aimed at replacing duo-employees with AI, but at eliminating bottlenecks so that people can focus on creative tasks and solving real problems instead of routine operations. Despite the gradual reduction of contractors, the company promises to invest in training, mentoring, and tools to effectively use AI within teams.

The letter describes several constructive restrictions that will help implement the plan: from now on, the use of AI will become one of the criteria for hiring and performance evaluation, and additional staff will be allocated only if automation is not possible. The CEO noted that the transition to algorithms has already managed to replace the slow manual process of content creation, which would have taken decades without AI.

Von Ahn compared the current AI revolution to Duolingo's decisive pivot to mobile platforms in 2012, when its mobile-first focus earned the company the title of iPhone App of the Year 2013 and explosive audience growth. Now, he is confident that AI will bring the company closer to its mission of providing quality education to millions of people, as it allows to quickly increase the amount of educational content and launch features that were previously unattainable, such as video lessons with a level of teaching close to that of the best tutors.

As a reminder, the UAE has announced the world's first initiative to introduce AI into the modernization of laws. The authorities are convinced that the use of algorithms will speed up the lawmaking process and make it more accurate.

We also wrote that in Australia, the radio station broadcast for months a programme with an AI-generated host. Listeners were not informed about this either in the programme description or on air.